Florida Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum first said he opposed the Arizona immigration law. But after his new opponent, self-funded former hospital CEO Rick Scott — the guy who spent all that money on the anti-HCR commercials — came out for it, McCollum’s had a change of heart and now supports it after all.
Scott has been in the race for all of a month. And he’s already giving McCollum, who was considered the de facto nominee, a run for his money.
From TPM Reader SS …
I was never a big fan of Specter, going way back to the Anita Hill hearings. While I don’t think that the confirmation of a Justice to the Supreme Court was or is the proper forum to try a sexual harassment case, I don’t know that I will ever get over the mean-spiritness Specter displayed. And as they say on “Survivor,” you can never really trust a flipper.
Still, I seriously considered voting for Specter. Even when he was a Republican, I agreed with many of the positions he took and the influence he wields on the appropriations and judiciary committees simply cannot be matched by a junior senator. All things being equal, he probably would have been my choice.
But things aren’t equal in one key respect — keeping that seat in the hands of the Democrats. And it has become clearer and clearer in recent days that Specter cannot beat Toomey. Sestak can, and that’s why I’ll be voting for him next week.
Pat Buchanan and other well-known cable news gender theory experts discuss the well-known connection between softball and lesbianism. Watch it.
Meet the man behind Arizona’s new ban on ‘ethnic studies’ classes in state schools.
It’s still not clear just what the effect of this law will be. But I think it’s being underreported nationally. I think this takes the situation in Arizona in a significantly new, uglier direction. We all know that the crackdown on illegal immigration in the state is filled with xenophobia and ethnic politics. It’s not just about enforcement immigration laws in some narrow sense. Even so, it’s pitched that way and many middle-of-the-road voters do see it that way. And we need to remember that violence spun off by the drug trade (as opposed to illegal immigration per se) is a genuine issue in the state.
But this isn’t about law and order or undocumented status. But this is much more clearly a law … to put it right out there, about white folks in Arizona who want the people in the Latino community to stop complaining so much. I mean, that’s was this is about. And there’s not even much of a veneer of anything else. It’s about stopping local school districts with large Hispanic populations from teaching their history the way they want to in their local schools. The whole push gets you much more into the realm of explicit ethnic or even racial conflict.
Bowing to the (seemingly) inevitable, establishment GOPers start realizing why they actually love Rand Paul after all.
Needless to say, such a sounding is far from scientific. It’s anecdotal by definition. But I’ve been reading the various emails we’re getting from people in Pennsylvania — or people in touch with family in PA. And there does seem to be a pretty clear pattern. Of the Democrats writing in, what we’re hearing is from people who didn’t seem particularly invested in either Specter or Sestak but have come out for Sestak because of a mixture of his ads and their belief that he’s just a stronger candidate versus Toomey in the general and a more reliable one — both ideologically and in terms of longevity — if he wins the general. Read More
Find out why Harry Reid’s campaign for reelection seems to be off life support and making a race of it in Nevada.
Yet another poll out today of the Pennsylvania Senate primary. And this one — from Suffolk — shows Sestak up by 9.
(Click TPM logo to see full sized graph.)
This one really may come down to whether the Democratic machine in the state can pull Arlen over the finish line.
Late Update: This is one reason why poll trend graphs are so fun (at least for political geeks). What you see in the graph is that the composite of all the polls shows that Specter’s support has been strikingly static. It’s almost an unbroken straight line going back to the Fall. No one’s come or gone. But starting in late February basically all the undecideds began to break in Sestak’s direction.
We’ve got a piece coming momentarily about some interesting developments in the Nevada Senate race. A series of different developments — not just ChickenGate, but an outbreak of the GOP civil war in the state — is making it seem like Harry Reid may really have a shot at keeping his seat in November. (Republicans have tended to see the Chicken/Barter nonsense as something Dems were pummeling Lowden with. And they were of course. But one of Lowden’s key primary opponents has also taken it up with a gusto — and seemingly to good effect.) To me Reid was looking firmly stuck in Dodd territory. But that could be changing. We’ll show you our report in a minute.